Category: Natural Sciences

Rating: 8.0/10. The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter by Colin Tudge Book about biology of trees and forests, containing scientific details of their evolution, lifecycle, and classification. Compared to “The Hidden Life of Trees,” this one is more scientific and denser, but is still written…

Rating: 8.1/10. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from A Secret World by Peter Wohlleben Book about forests and trees, made up of about 30 short chapters, it was originally written in German; each chapter describes some aspects of trees and it’s written in plain and non-technical language….

Rating: 7.8/10. Book examining many aspects of life throughout history, with a focus on energy use. Energy may be considered a kind of universal currency that determines the quality of life across very different periods, from prehistoric societies to agriculture, the industrial revolution, and today. As civilization has advanced, we’ve gotten better at harnessing new…

Rating: 7.6/10. The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines by Michael E. Mann A memoir by a climate scientist about the politics of climate change and the efforts of climate change denialists to sway public opinion on the subject. Initially there were some legitimate scientific debate about whether global warming…

Rating: 7.7/10. Firmament: The Hidden Science of Weather, Climate Change and the Air That Surrounds Us by Simon Clark Book by a popular YouTuber who recently finished his PhD in atmospheric science, explaining his field to a general audience. Each of the nine chapters covers a different topic: the people who discovered it, and the…

Rating: 7.8/10. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene Book survey of the neuroscience of reading, written by a prominent researcher. Our brains did not evolve to read, yet we can learn to read by “recycling” parts of our visual system to recognize letters and words instead of objects….

Rating: 8.1/10. How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine… for Now by Stanislas Dehaene Book by neuroscience researcher about human learning. A lot of cognition is taken for granted until we try to train AI to do it, then it becomes apparent how difficult it actually is. AI still has a long…

Rating: 7.7/10. Book by physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose that touches on a lot of disparate topics in artificial intelligence, computability theory, consciousness, and advanced quantum physics. This book reads like a guided tour for an intelligent but non-specialist audience. The overall thesis is not revealed until the last chapter, where all the different threads…

Rating: 8.0/10. Book about animal cognition and methods to probe them. Recently, we are starting to learn that many animals are more intelligent than we thought, because the methodology to test their intelligence in the past was flawed. Instead of giving them artificial, one-size-fits-all tests, we should take into account each species’ individual “Umwelt” —…

Rating: 7.3/10. Book about child language acquisition by a Yale linguistics professor and researcher in the area. Each chapter talks about a different areas of linguistics (eg: phonology, morphology, syntax) and how children acquire it. There’s a lot that we don’t understand about the language acquisition process, but it seems to be very efficient and…

Rating: 8.2/10. One of the longer books I’ve read, this is a 660-page book about geology. It is actually composed of five books that were separately published from 1981 to 1998. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. The author has a narrative style that takes a while to get used to: at first…